eryone knows I'm as conservative as they come," he drawled. "My approach as a cop had always been either arrest the problem or scare the problem away with high- profile prosecutions. You know, 'Cuff' em and stuff'em.' But in West End the prob- lem always came back." When he first heard about Kennedys strategy, he thought it was ridiculous, but he agreed to meet him. "David said, 'Give me a half hour be- fore you decide I'm crazy.' And at the end of that half hour I was still sitting there." Kennedy's strategy not only closed down the West End drug market; the drug market disappeared the day after the first call-in. "We had worked on these problems for twenty years and got nowhere, and in one day it was over," F ealy said. "In one day. Honestly, I never would have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes." It's unclear whether any of the dozen or so High Point drug dealers who called the services number ultimately left behind the life of crime. None of the root-cause prob- lems behind drugs and crime were solved; drug dealing may have moved indoors, or to other neighborhoods, or to nearby cities. But public drug dealing never returned to West End, and, once the threat was re- moved from the streets, the community re- claimed its neighborhood. Within weeks, residents were planting flowers in their gar- dens, and in the spring of 2005 the com- munity threw a barbecue for the police. Colonel Dean Esserman, chief of the =- Providence Police Department, brought Kennedys strategy to open-air drug mar- kets in his city, beginning in 2006, and so far the results have been spectacular and sustained. Esserman, a former assistant district attorney in New York City, now gives a speech he calls "Getting Ready for David Kennedy." When I asked Esser- man what it takes to get ready, he re- sponded with one word: "Failure." By that, he said, he meant "the failure of the idea that you can deal with the problem of drugs by arresting it." It had taken Esser- man years of work on narcotics cases in N ew York to reach this state of readiness. "As a younger prosecutor, I wasn't ready. Maybe as a younger cop, Chief Streicher wasn't ready, either." The next step for Kennedy and his colleagues is to expand these regional successes into what he calls a "national standard of practice." To that end, Ken- nedy is working with Jeremy Travis, the president of John Jay College, on a na- tional network of people trained in the use of Ceasefire-style gang-violence and drug-market strategies. Kennedy, who is now the director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay, has submitted a white paper to Eric Holder, the Attorney General, outlin- ing the proposal, and he and Travis plan to announce the National Network for Safe Communities on June 15th, at the annual meeting of the United States Conference of Mayors, in Providence. /þ \ \ K-q n ì t\ 'T'm saving that one for someone really special" "Clearly this stuff works," Travis said. "David has proved that when you com- municate directly with offenders, tell them their actions have consequences- not abstract consequences but direct, im- mediate ones-and then offer them a way out, that it can have an enormous deter- rence value." He added, "The last ten years have served as a proof of concept. In the next ten, we need to build a network that can institutionalize and sustain these practices around the country." Could a methodology that works on gangs also work on other groups-terror- ists, say? "The group dynamics are similar to the gang dynamics Ceasefire deals with," Kennedy said. "People don't think you could deter terrorists with a moral ar- gument, but maybe you could." Marc Sageman, a terrorism expert who is the author of the 2008 book "Leaderless Jihad," told me, "There is quite a lot of ev- idence in the terrorism literature that this type of gang-intervention program can work, if you apply it to terrorists in the early stages of the radicalization process. Then it could very well work-because there's nothing deterministic about be- coming a terrorist. But at a certain point, once terrorism becomes something one does for a higher cause, I don't think this type of method would work." Scott Atran, an anthropologist who has done field work with jihadist groups and is also on the faculty at John Jay, told me that Ken- nedys "community-based ideas seem to jibe with what I see works with young people in neighborhoods where friends go off in bunches to jihad. Few ever join jihad alone, and they almost always com- mit to it, including suicide bombings, for love of friends and family." He added, "There's also a strong dose of'jihadi co of that clerics can't penetrate too well, unless theyre plugged into the youth culture." S takes were high at the December, 2008, call-in. Kennedy went to Cin- cinnati for a rehearsal the week before, in an effort to avoid the mistakes of the di- sastrous June call-in. On December 10th, I accompanied him to the Hamilton County Courthouse. Kennedy wore his usual dark shirt, dark suit, and dark tie. The hall outside the courtroom was crowded with the heterogeneous group that makes up the C.I.R.V. team. Jim Whalen was there, with his nine- teen-year-old daughter, Amy, a student